Today, telephone and cable networks are the core information infrastructure of virtually every business (large or small) and home user. E-business is no longer a concept or catch-phrase, it is a way of life. As a result, business requirements are fueling evolution and innovation in the network. This has created a demand for new services such as data, voice, video, and other packet protocol applications. To meet these demands, legacy voice, cable TV and data networks are headed for convergence onto a common, ubiquitous, multipurpose network-based platform.
If or when the telecommunication industry arrives at a set of communication interface standards, this will set the stage for the next generation of data communication, which is service creation. To deliver converged services such as voice, video and data with Quality of Service (QoS) cost effectively, carriers desire to stretch network intelligence from the Central Office (CO) to the customer premises.
Traditional Internet Protocol (IP) networks, operate on a connectionless, best-effort basis, with all packets subject to equal treatment as they are routed individually hop-by-hop throughout the network to their ultimate destination. This best-effort model of fairness translates to relative unfairness for traffic that is more sensitive to network impairments and does not align well with business plans that call for delivery of a rich portfolio of differentiated services and applications.
Consequently, delivering revenue-generating applications over converged, IP-based infrastructures creates a desire for a different breed of access networks. This type of network can be engineered to deliver carrier-class service but the network can be optimized to associate traffic streams with the respective applications and process each traffic stream according to a predefined Service Level Agreement (SLA). Customers desire such optimized networks to provide the same and preferably better service quality than existing infrastructures. To ensure that each service receives the appropriate QoS treatment and meets SLA obligations, the Network Interface Device (NID) will manage, monitor and control network traffic at the service level (i.e., provide advanced traffic management and engineering services).